Computers are huge consumers of electricity - this costs computer owners money and leads to massive CO2 emissions producing the necessary power. The free program Granola can help you to save money and reduce your carbon footprint by reducing the speed at which your computer operates.

Getting the program up and running could hardly be simpler. Once installed, Granola will automatically reduce the power consumption of your computer. This can be tweaked by choosing to switch off power saving, stick with the MiserWare recommended, balanced settings, or go for the biggest savings by using Lowest Speed mode. That really is all there is to it.

But Granola takes things a little further by demonstrating what a difference these power settings make. A clear, concise interface illustrates how much money you are saving each year with your current power settings and shows how much you have helped the environment by showing you by how much you will have reduced your carbon footprint.

Power consumption isn’t something that desktop computer users tend to think about, but it is of great importance to laptop users. By slightly reducing system performance, it is possible to greatly improve battery life and therefore increase the amount of time you can spend using your computer away from a power source.

Verdict:

Whether used to save money, help the environment or improve battery life, it is hard to find anything bad to say about Granola.

There's a vast amount to learn, of course, and that's even before you start building your game. But there's plenty of documentation, tutorials, demos and sample projects to point you in the right direction.

The package is now entirely free, too - no annoying limitations, nag screens or anything else. Epic now only requires that you pay a 5% royalty after the first $3,000 of revenue per product per quarter. And even then, you "pay no royalty for film projects, contracting and consulting projects such as architecture, simulation and visualization."